Crowdfunding Project to bring SageTV to Android TV

SageTV was a software product in a similar vein to current apps like Kodi and Plex. It was commercial DVR (digital video recording) and HTPC (home theater PC) software that was designed to run on all three major desktop OSes. It was a handy tool, allowing users to quickly share videos and convert to compressed formats that would play better on mobile devices. One of the products they had was the SageTV Placeshifter that enabled you to watch TV from any Internet connection. This can be seen as analogous to the Slingbox today.

In 2011 the company was acquired by Google and they shut down their store. However, they did open source their project to GitHub so development could continue even if the software was no longer maintained by the current group. A lot of SageTV’s work went into Google Fiber cable boxes. SageTV continues to have a small following today as well as a 3rd party plugin ecosystem. However, up to this point the software only has run on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

A developer named Sean Stuckless has recently launched an Indiegogo campaign to port SageTV to Android, including Android TV. The money will be used to purchase hardware in order to test on a wider range of Android devices.

In the past day, the campaign has already been successfully funded. He has raised over $1000 from 25 backers. It will end on January 12, so he still has over 50 days to raise funds to improve the product more. However, none of the rewards have any meaningful value to the end user. A $10 perk is just a $10 donation. It is only once you get to $100 and above that you are credited in the app. Still, that doesn’t seem to have deterred users.

Based on this forum post, there is already some success at getting the software to run on the Nexus Player, Sony Android TVs, and the NVIDIA Shield TV. The developer has been committed to making this app open source, and he has already made dozens of commits on GitHub.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.